Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Isaiah Berlin was one of the most eminent intellectual
historians of the twentieth century. Twenty years ago he wrote an essay about
the dangers of idealism.

In it he called for moderation, temperance, compromise and
trade-offs. The essay was delivered on his behalf at the University of Toronto.

This week The New York Review of Books, to its great credit,
republished the essay.

Berlin began by noting the unexampled destruction visited on
the world by Communism. I would add that, beyond the fact that Communism
represented a form of idealistic madness, it was also a cultural enactment of
atheism.

Berlin wrote:

Men
have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun,
Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian
massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its
aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of
information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are
unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes,
and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could
have been averted.

To make clear his opposition to Germanic idealism, Berlin
rejected the notion of historical determinism. He argued for free will and
explained that human actions set the course of history; it could have set
another course. There was nothing inevitable about the advent of Communism, or, for that matter, its decline. I
have argued the same point in my book The
Last Psychoanalyst.

Berlin also rejected the notion that Communism was produced
by negative human emotions and impulses. Clearly, he had no use for the concept
of a death instinct.

For Berlin, Communism was produced by ideas. It was created
by those who latched on to a big idea, decided that it would solve all human
problems and who concluded that if human lives and human behavior were an
impediment to the realization of the idea, they could easily be dispensed with.

In Berlin’s words:

They
were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as
Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though
of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our
time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl
Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal
social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the
transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he
wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his
famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in
his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not
have cut off the head of the King of France.

… in a
debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment
thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under
the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that
they know perfection can be reached.

… If
you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that
one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is
necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price
can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the
stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them.
Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be
passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be
violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.
Lenin believed this after reading Das
Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free,
virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end
justified any methods that needed to be used, literally an.

The
root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human
life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It
can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose
word is law.

The deeper problem with idealism, he continued, was that the
values it generates are not harmonious. If you apply all of those values in the most
extreme fashion, you will find yourself facing contradictions.

By Berlin’s lights, Barry Goldwater should have said:
Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice; moderation in the pursuit of
justice is a virtue.

Had Goldwater done so, he would have been engaging in
conservative thought. As was, he was trafficking in a modernized version of
Germanic idealism… a wolf in sheep’s clothes.

Problems arise when politicians have not thought about the
deeper philosophical questions and issues.

Berlin explained the problem:

The
central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great
many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always
harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for
liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But
complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly
free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that
human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are
not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were
competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to
subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace,
otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice
has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy.
Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully
reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible
calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be
fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if
I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or
freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and
blissful ignorance. And so on.

Berlin did not mention it, perhaps because it goes without
saying, but the progenitor of Western idealism was obviously Plato. In
rejecting Platonism, Berlin was offering an exercise in Aristotelian thought.

He rejected drama in favor of temperance and compromise. He
recommended that we get over our adolescent enthusiasm for great ideas and set
about the hard work of finding the mean between the extremes.

I am
afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human
values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs,
arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for
so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so
much justice for so much compassion….

So we
must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one
form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under
which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it
seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous
emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not
only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a
single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity,
invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken,
but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human
lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget
the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.

Rich: Plato was a fascist... the original totalitarian muse of those who would impose the common good. You know, the "philosopher kings" like Hitler, Stalin, etc. They all loved Plato.

I'm not a fan of Berlin's view of "positive rights," in light of our Constitution's framework of negative rights. Beasts need to be kept at bay, which is why a government works best within negative rights that impose limits on government, not the individual. Philosopher kings like Obama like positive rights as a way to impose the common good... in their own demagogic view, of course. I suppose I shouldn't fault Berlin for bringing forth a new theory, but I do tire of Lefties prancing around trying to sound sophisticated with their ideas of positive and negative rights.